All sublime Art is symbolistic. What is the message the great violinist brings you? Ah, you cannot impart it! Each must hear it for himself. The note that is “clear” to all is not Art. When Charles Lamb pointed to the row of ledgers in the office of the East India Company and said, “These are my works,” he was only joking; for he afterward explained that ledgers, indices, catalogues, directories, almanacs, reports, and briefs are not literature at all. These things inspire no poems; they give no glow. The province of Art is not to present a specific message, but to impart a feeling. If we go home from the Lyceum hushed, treading on air, we have heard Oratory, even though we cannot recall a single sentence; and if we read a poem that brings the unbidden tears and makes the room seem a sacred chancel, we have read Literature. The Master has imparted to our spirits a tithe of his own sublimity of soul. For the good old ladies who prick the Bible for a message I have a profound sympathy: the Sacred Page fits man’s every mood, and this is why it is immortal. That which is clear is ephemeral. Symbolism requires interpreters, and lo! colleges spring up with no other intent than to train men to explain a Book; for the Saviours of the world all speak in parables. They see the significance of Things and voice a various language. The interpreter makes the symbolist immortal, and the symbolist makes the fame of the interpreter. If Turner had been “clear,” Ruskin might still be Assistant Professor. All Holy Writ from Moses to Whitman is mystical. The writer has breathed into its nostrils the breath of life, that impalpable, elusive Something which we forever seek and which forever escapes us. Of course, I would not have a writer endeavor to be mystical—this would be positively base; but I would have each man who feels that he has something to say express himself in his own way, without let, hindrance, or injunction from writers on rhetoric, who having never produced anything to speak of themselves, yet are willing for jingling coin to show others how. III. “What do you do when you are preaching and can’t think of anything to say?” asked a Fledgeling of his pastor. “I just holler,” was the answer of the experienced Exhorter. With half a million preachers in the United States, with families to keep on an average salary of five hundred dollars, I do not blame them for “hollerin’;” neither do I censure editors who have to fill three columns each day if they often “holler;” as an economist I might advise a man to “holler,” but as a lover of literature I cannot conscientiously do so.